STAREAST 2017 - Concurrent Sessions

Acceptance testing is often thought of as the little brother of system testing and, in many projects, it ends up as a little phase at the end. Having worked in system testing for most of her testing career, Bettina Faldborg found it was a bigger jump than you might think to move to acceptance testing. She had this overwhelming urge to test it ALL. Like most testers, she did not assume that what has been tested before was done well enough, but that is one of the preconditions to accept going into an acceptance test. With regard to acceptance testing Bettina presents four basic...

Finding time to learn test techniques, mentor other testers, grow application knowledge, and cross-train your team members is a daunting task with a complicated recipe. What if you could do these things while testing and finding bugs? Enter Pair Testing. What’s that? Well, maybe you’ve heard of pair programming. It’s like that—only you’re testing rather than programming. And it’s the secret sauce of agile testing because it makes your routine, bland testing so much more fun! Testers on Jess Lancaster’s team use pair testing not only to make better software but also to foster better...

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the most important technology for software testers to understand today. All software will soon have AI-powered components, and they are unlike anything you’ve ever tested before. As risky as AI can be, it is a powerful weapon for testers to solve some of their most painful testing challenges today. The web was great, mobile is interesting, but AI will truly change the way you build and test all software. Jason Arbon gives a brief introduction to AI and machine learning (ML) so you can nod your head knowingly when the topics come up. Explore how products that...

Unrestrained access to a trustworthy and realistic test environment—including the application under test and all of its dependent components—is essential for achieving “quality @ speed” with agile, DevOps, and continuous delivery. Service virtualization is an emerging technology that provides teams access to a complete test environment by simulating the dependent components that are beyond their control, still evolving, or too complex to configure in a test lab. Arthur Hicken covers the ABCs of service virtualization—what it is and how it impacts Access, Behavior, Cost, and Speed....

Over the past twenty years, Mary Thorn has had the opportunity to work at many startups, creating several QA/test departments from scratch. For the past ten years, she has done this in agile software companies. Recently Mary moved from leading small agile test organizations to leading a large agile test organization. She has learned how to lead agile testers and agile testing in large contexts. Mary takes you through what she has learned, identifies the keys to transitioning your test organization as it grows, and discusses the techniques required to lead it through the changes. Agile...

Classical test process improvement is often not today’s best solution. With virtualization, SOA, web, cloud, mobile, and integration with social media, the way we develop, test, and manage has drastically changed. Jeroen explores why Agile, context-driven testing, SCRUM, continuous integration/development and DevOps require a flexible and pragmatic context-driven approach to test improvement. Context-driven test improvement is organized on two levels. [1] The improvement architecture level starts by clarifying the goal, scope, and context. This results in the improvement approach, a...

Software development is trending toward building systems using small, autonomous, independently deployable services called microservices. Leveraging microservices makes it easier to add and modify system behavior with minimal or no service interruption. Because they facilitate releasing software early, frequently, and continuously, microservices are especially popular in DevOps. But how do microservices affect software testing and testability? Are there new testing challenges that arise from this paradigm? Or are these simply old challenges disguised as new ones? Join Tariq King as he...

We often talk about agile in terms of development of new systems, sometimes called greenfield projects. These scenarios present us with a “cleaner” version of agile. But Jim Peers is asking the question: What about agile methodologies when applied to the maintenance of a mature product? A mature product brings into play many more variables—addition or upgrading of features, addressing technical debt, bug fixing, security and accessibility concerns, and working with an aging codebase. And each variable brings its own challenges. By necessity, these scenarios can force us to adapt our work...

The testing community is caught between the devil and the deep blue sea when it comes to exploratory testing. Although exploratory testing has been around for ages, it often leads to more confusion than clarity. Is exploratory testing an activity—something that you do? Or is it an approach—a way or a style of doing something? Isn’t all testing exploratory? When do you do it? How do you do it properly? How does it relate to the entire software lifecycle? To answer these questions, Ingo Philipp outlines the most common confusions and controversies on this topic. He explains what exploratory...

All organizations doing mobile development have critical decisions in common—selecting which devices to support and how to test their products across the growing range of devices. With the segregation of device brands, organizations are forced to support at least three code bases (Apple, Android, and Windows). This makes it three times more challenging for testing organizations to keep up with the minimum required testing efforts for their products. Ardy Signey says that test leadership has to look beyond conventional testing strategies and become more innovative. Companies that already...

DevOps and regulatory compliance are two critically important ingredients in today’s connected organization. The first—DevOps—enables you to move quickly and respond to change in an era where change is increasing at an exponential rate with no sign of slowing down. The second—regulatory compliance—ensures that your organization takes the appropriate steps to follow relevant laws surrounding your software development lifecycle and appears to require adding burdensome processes and controls. At first glance, these two ideas seem to be incompatible, but they actually go together like peanut...

Have you ever been dragged into a production emergency that severely drains deadlines, budgets, morale, and weekends only to find out—yet again—that the problem is related to application stability and performance under load? Building a culture that embraces proactive and well-planned performance testing is no small feat. Tom Poirier shares a journey that begins with clarifying enterprise performance requirements, performing competitive analysis, cost-justifying purchases, and closing the deal with senior management. Tom walks through practical challenges including technical difficulties,...

James Koch demonstrates how to apply test-driven development and continuous integration using Appium, an industry leading open-source automation tool. Appium was inspired by Selenium for web browser testing. Their philosophy—Why do anything different for mobile? Appium allows you to run tests without having to add any third party framework or extension into your application, so you are testing the same application you are shipping! With faster release cycles, the need for quality testing is more necessary than ever. Tools like Appium leverage continuous integration and test-driven...

The challenge for test teams in organizations that want to use blockchain technologies is to not only test chaincode that manages the execution of transactions on their blockchain networks but also to test the provision and scalability of the blockchain networks themselves. James Hunter presents new approaches that are emerging to test blockchain technology, supply-chain business processes and transactions, and APIs from multiple perspectives; to simulate the behavior of consensus within a blockchain network; and to test integrations at scale without affecting the distributed ledger. James...

Traditional performance testing practices don't scale when you begin delivering software using cloud computing and DevOps. Troy Marshall shares how Ellucian transformed their performance testing program using the same principles DevOps uses to deliver software. It isn't enough just to automate the execution of performance tests. You must continually optimize every step—from building the performance test tool infrastructure, configuring test scripts and scenarios, collecting metrics, and reporting results. In addition, by using cloud computing to implement performance testing, you...

Cloud computing continues to grow rapidly, and as everything moves to the cloud, testing must adapt and move to the cloud as well. The cloud enables building solutions that scale larger and faster than before—back when adding capacity in data centers took weeks or months. Now applications can be deployed to cloud servers not in days but minutes. The cloud enables new approaches that increase testing efficiency and quality while decreasing total testing time. Tom Chavez discusses the migration of applications to the cloud, and the new tools and services there—from web browser functional...

Organizations worldwide are continually required to make significant investments in upgrading, re-engineering, and protecting their IT infrastructure. However, unlike application software development, many companies lack a structured quality assurance approach for infrastructure testing. Creating an infrastructure quality practice is an answer, but it's not without its challenges. However, if your company is interested in avoiding headline-grabbing outages, rooted in deployment problems with infrastructure—server, network, storage, middleware, telephony, hardware, IT security,...

Has your organization moved to agile but your metrics have not? Do you spend multiple hours each week generating separate sets of metrics for your agile squad, management, and C-level executives? Do you find yourself questioning the things you measure and actions you take as a result of those measurements? Prachi Maini introduces you to a set of lean but comprehensive metrics that show the efficiency and effectiveness of the squads, the primary activities of the squad, and that of the overall project. Learn the key evaluators for measuring quality of code, quality of quality...

With most organizations now using agile software development methodologies, the software development focus has changed to deliver faster releases—and this affects the way we test within the sprint. We largely develop applications using cloud and mobile technologies with short release cycles. Our challenges include frequent changes in requirements, the addition of incremental features to the product, and release at any point of time. Ganesh Iyer has found that continuous testing can seamlessly address most of these challenges. Continuous testing is the ability to run tests continuously in a...